Tutorial - Sync2It's Bookmark Manager

Sync2It's bookmark manager is a client side application that will help you manage your bookmark collection. If you have a large collection of bookmarks, or you want to do some pretty helpful tasks with a growing bookmark collection, this is a tool that will help you organize and maintain your bookmarks.

Since it maintains your bookmarks in offline databases, you'll never have to worry about problems with your BookmarkSync server causing you to loose your bookmark collection. You can store several variations of your bookmark collections and publish each of them wherever you like!

Start up

When you start Sync2It's bookmark manager for the first time, you'll get a question dialog asking you if you want to enable "Auto Update". This is a function which automatically checks for new updates of the bookmark manager during startup. If you have an always-on internet connection, you should enable this feature, otherwise you can check for updates manually now and then using the supplied button in the options dialog.

Sync2It's bookmark manager operates by creating a database(s) for your bookmarks. When you open the program for the very first time, you'll see an empty window. To create your first bookmark database click File->New or press the shortcut Ctrl+D. Enter a name for your database, for example "my bookmarks.bkm" and click Save to create the database.

Now the bookmark manager window will contain two folders; the root folder of your collection, named "Bookmarks" and the trashcan.

Create bookmarks and folders

The popup menu

Assuming you've created a database by now, we're now going to populate that empty database. One of the key concepts of Sync2It's bookmark manager is the popup menu, most important functions are placed there. Right-click on the root folder named "Bookmarks" and you'll get to the popup menu.

Create a bookmark

In most cases you'll want to jump to the "Import existing bookmarks" section at this point. If you don't have any bookmarks that you want to import, you can select New bookmark or use the shortcut Ctrl+N to create your first bookmark. Enter a descriptive title, for example "Sync2It's bookmark manager project site". Then click into the URL text field and enter the URL "http://sf.net/projects/bkm/". Now press the Enter key or click the button Save to save your changes. The bookmark is now saved to the database. If you want to open this bookmark in the browser, double-click it in the treeview. This will open your default browser. You can change this behavior in the settings.

Create and use a folder

Storing all the bookmarks in the same folder isn't really useful so Sync2It's bookmark manager allows you to categorize your bookmarks using folders. To create a folder open the popup menu and click New folder. You can also press the shortcut Ctrl+A. You get a new folder with the name "New folder". To rename it, enter the new title and press Enter. For this example's sake, enter "Bookmark-Manager" as the title and press the Enter key.

An empty folder isn't very useful so we're going to move the example bookmark into this folder. This is possible with Drag&Drop . Just move the bookmark over the new folder.

Also any newly created bookmark or folder using the methods described above will be created in the active folder. So if you select the new folder and press the shortcut Ctrl+N the bookmark is created in this folder.

Navigate around

There are two primary ways to navigate around in your bookmark collection. One is to navigate manually and the other is finding your bookmarks using the search function.

Navigating manually

If you navigate manually you just open every folder where you think your bookmark might lie. This procedure is quite effective if your bookmarks are organized well. But if your bookmarks are one big mess the search function is more useful.

The search function was one of the main reasons why I started developing Bookmark-Manager. You can fire the search window with the shortcut Ctrl+F or by clicking the menu item Extras->Search.

Now enter your search term and press Enter. This will start the search using the default options. The default options just include all bookmarks or folders which match the search term in any field.

If you're working with a really large bookmark collection, you may want to use the advanced function. Click on the field "Search options" to open the search settings. You can narrow the results using different qualifiers. For example you can tell the search function to only find bookmarks (Type = Bookmark) and to search the URL for the search term but no other fields.

Import existing bookmarks

The average user of Sync2It has rather large bookmark collection. Sync2It's bookmark manager allows you to easily transfer all of your existing bookmarks into it's database. The procedure is almost the same for any of the three browsers currently supported so we'll show you the principles using Opera.

Start up the Opera import window with the menu item File->Import>Opera. Type the name to the Opera hotlist file into the text box. If you don't know the exact location of this file you can use the browse function. Press the button with the three dots and you'll get the browse dialog. Go to the folder where your Opera installation lies, select the hotlist file ("Opera5.adr" for recent installations) and press the Open button.

The next step is to select the folder where you want to import the new bookmarks into. You can create new folders directly from the import window. I suggest you to create a folder with a name indicating that it contains temporary items. For example "_tmp".

After selecting the right folder press the button Import. If you have a really large bookmark collection this may take some time. As soon as the import has finished you'll get a message saying that everything is fine and you can continue working. The bookmarks are now imported and you can sort them using the 'move' functionalities.

Sync2It's Bookmark Manager

Introduction

What is the bookmark manager?